With the widespread use of the Internet and the prevalence of wireless access points, people are growing accustomed to being able to access whatever data they want, whenever and wherever they want it. Unfortunately, there continue to be venues in which access to a network has a desired digital asset (a “source network”) is slow, sporadic, or impossible. For example, moving vehicles, such as airplanes, cars, ships and trains, may move in and out of range of wireless access points. Even when within range, the bandwidth of the connection between such vehicles and the source network is often far less than that desired by the occupants.
In some cases, venues that have a slow or sporadic connection to a source network have a fast and reliable connection to a local network. For example, a cruise ship or airplane may have a relatively fast local area network that is always available to its passengers. Such local networks are referred to herein as “target networks”.
Unfortunately, target networks frequently do not have the capacity to contain all of the data the passengers could possibly want to access. Consequently, even when a relatively fast target network is available, users are severely handicapped when the communication channel between that target network and the source network is slow, sporadic, or becomes severed.
As used herein, a “less-connected venue” refers to any venue in which computing device users have relatively fast access to a target network, but the target network has relatively slow, sporadic, or no access to a higher-capacity source network. Examples of less-connected venues include moving vehicles, such as airplanes, trains and ships. In these venues, the target network is the on-board network with which passenger devices can establish connections, while the source network is a land-based network that does not move in conjunction with the moving vehicles. In such cases, the source network is typically the Internet, or a wireless network (e.g. 3G, 4G) whose transmission stations are land-based and/or stationary. However, less-connected venues may also be stationary, such as hotels whose connection to the Internet is insufficient to allow all customers to concurrently stream videos from the Internet into their hotel rooms.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to provide users that are in a less-connected venue all of the resources that are available to users that are connected to a source network. For example, the target network on an airplane does not have the capacity to hold all movies that air passengers may desire to view. Further, depending on the flight path, an airplane's connection with an air-to-ground network may periodically become severed. Even if it were possible to reliably maintain a connection with the air-to-ground network, the bandwidth of the connection would generally be insufficient to allow all passengers to stream their desired content from the source network.